Is there an alternative to SharePoint?

September 27, 2018

Some of the speakers fromIntraTeam Event Stockholm 2018 have answered questions regarding the intranet/digital workplace in the future. Below you can read what the speakers think about the question “Is there an alternative to SharePoint?”

Oscar Berg, Unicorn Titans – Yes, there is. There is an ecosystem of digital services today that, when combining them, are more capable than SharePoint. The days are (soon) over when organizations look for a generic platform to build things upon. Instead they will look for digital services. I also believe more organizations will adopt a best of breed approach to the digital services. This also means APIs and easy integration and orchestration will be more in focus that it is today, as well as the ability to create a consistent user experience across digital services. By the way I am convinced that SharePoint will seize to exist as a concept in the Microsoft portfolio quite soon. Instead of SharePoint we will talk about Teams, Sites, Hubs, Power BI, and so on.

Agnes Molnar, Search Explained – The first thing I would recommend is Office 365. Providing more and more complex and connected apps its value grows exponentially, from small to large organizations.

David Kennedy, Redd Barna – Not really, If an organization is using Office 365 to produce documentation then it is too difficult to look at anything else. Whether it stays Sharepoint or merges into Teams is a separate story.

Cecilie Rask, Danish National Police – There definitely is… I’ve seen lots of great intranets that wasn’t SharePoint based over the years. SharePoint gives you some benefits e.g. document handling, metadata out of the box , but it is a massive system to work with and there are lots of boundaries and things you can’t do with SharePoint.

Elena Bogdanova, Rivelty.Intranet – It’s a really good question. It’s hard to say “yes” or “no”, it depends on your company type, what you have already and what is planning to reach. At some situations there are not many options then Sharepoint. If you are a big global company, where a lot of Microsoft products used and integrated, some of Sharepoint licenses already prepaid in SLA, you have a support team, some tools had been developed already, most likely you will choose Sharepoint.If you are an IT company with great products developing expertise, with resources to build internal product, love working with open-source, has strong project management skills, then you might prefer the self-developed platform that will ideally meet company needs.If you are small or middle size company and would like to get classical intranet tools out-of-the-box then you might like to choose locally build platform. For example, in Russia 1C-Bitrix is often being chosen.

Sharon O’Dea, Lithos Partners – It depends. Some organisations will have plenty to choose from, but for larger organisations it’s increasingly the default for knowledge collaboration, especially now Jive’s not the player it was.

Oscar Berg, Unicorn Titans – Yes, there is. There is an ecosystem of digital services today that, when combining them, are more capable than SharePoint. The days are (soon) over when organizations look for a generic platform to build things upon. Instead they will look for digital services. I also believe more organizations will adopt a best of breed approach to the digital services. This also means APIs and easy integration and orchestration will be more in focus that it is today, as well as the ability to create a consistent user experience across digital services. By the way I am convinced that SharePoint will seize to exist as a concept in the Microsoft portfolio quite soon. Instead of SharePoint we will talk about Teams, Sites, Hubs, Power BI, and so on.

Phil Kropp,OrangeTrail – Yes…. But ask yourself the question ‘what are you trying to achieve’ before you jump to the answer…Sharepoint.

Rikard Spålséus, Swedish Match – Yes, but we, like a lot of companies, we use Microsoft’s products from A-Z, and with all the integrations, sticking with SharePoint is the easiest and best option for us.